In this text, we’ll focus on fears and psychological reasons for easily giving up on relationships, although fears and psychological reasons also extend to the other three divisions: immature thinking, character traits and identity, and attachment styles and patterns.

This is my internal division, and I have tried to encompass and explain all the most apparent reasons.

But before I say anything else, I must emphasize a few points.

Although we would all like to believe that others are the reason why things in our lives don’t go how we want, and it would be easiest for me to talk about others and their responsibilities, if you want to solve a problem, you will get the best results if you start with yourself. You can’t change other people, you can’t control them, but you can change the things within yourself that you don’t like and control yourself—your destiny.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  C.G. Jung

After you do everything you can with yourself, you can say that the rest of the responsibility for things not going well lies with others.

However, I would suggest identifying how these experiences have defined you and why, because of them, things in your life today are not progressing, are regressing, or not being good.

Although this topic will focus on the reasons why people give up on relationships, what you discover about yourself will be applicable to everything else in your life. As a psychologist, I know that one character trait spills over into many aspects of life, so when we solve one thing, we usually solve many essential things.

After this introduction, today we will talk about why you easily give up on relationships.

Behind each of the reasons listed below are fears. Some recognize them directly as fears, while others are wrapped in various layers.

Should You stay In your Relationship?

Fears / Psychological Reasons

You belong to an unfortunate group so traumatized by intimacy and closeness that you cannot form a good, lasting relationship.

However, intimacy and the feeling of closeness and belonging are among the few things we need to be happy. Yes, people can be highly functional without intimacy and closeness, but to be satisfied, we need to know that we belong to someone. So if you find yourself in one of these reasons for why you can’t form a relationship, it wouldn’t be bad to try to resolve that problem.

Fear of Intimacy

as a reason why do you give up on relationships

Because intimacy requires the person to open up, and opening up makes the person vulnerable. So you flee as soon as someone starts to open up to you or expects you to open up to them.

Yes, the world can be a dangerous place. There are people there who will take advantage of anything you tell them about yourself. I have written a lot about this in this article The Impact of Toxic Friendships on Our Self-Love But, besides psychotherapy, which can help, there is a way to deal with this fear.

I often tell my clients: “Okay, we have agreed on what you will do. Now you need to do it” (sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t). But even if you go through psychotherapy, what you should do in this case is to go for what you want (to form a lasting relationship – to be happy knowing you belong to someone and they belong to you), but do it in a way that doesn’t hurt you along the way. Therefore, try to test the people you like very slowly.

With each new trust you gain, reward that person with another small step.

Lack of Self-Love

People who don’t love themselves think that others can’t love them either

It can be very well hidden. I’ve met and talked with many people who are very, very open to the world (even public figures or performers) who have extremely low self-esteem or love for themselves. Even they only faintly realize that they have a poor opinion of themselves.

Whether openly or covertly, low self-love, self-esteem, or self-respect results in thinking that you’re not anything special and that no one will want you because of it. And those who do like you are only there to use you or are only there temporarily. Therefore, it’s best to leave them before they leave you.

Working on your self-confidence is the obvious solution for you. But to put it briefly:

Wherever this problem arises, it’s time to revise your attitudes about yourself. It’s time to sit down (really sit down several times) with your thoughts and go through your attitudes about yourself. Why do you have a wrong opinion of yourself? Who do you compare yourself to? What character trait of yours affects this?

If something is from the past, is that data still relevant, no matter how deeply you believe in it?

Everything that we deeply believe in, especially what negatively affects our lives, needs to be revised. This is not easy and belongs to self-analysis, the most difficult analysis in the world, but it is also the most useful thing you will do for yourself.

Useful text on this topic: An Important Conversation We Need to Have With Ourself

Fear of Being Taken Advantage Of

It’s about the fear that someone will take something of ours, and that we won’t be able to defend ourselves. And because of this, when these people get the slightest hint that someone wants to use them, they often get out of the relationship quickly.

How To Set Boundaries In a Relationship – 12 Steps

Sources of this fear:

1. Childhood, when our parents or guardians betrayed us
2. Society, which nurtures individualism
3. Movies, tv shows, social networks that create the impression that people are bad
4. Self-doubt and inability to set boundaries and defend ourselves
5. Strong need to control your life, because we didn’t have it in the past

The truth is, people always stay with others because they get something from them. Only when you think someone wants to use you, does it sound nasty? Yes, some might want to, but most want something from you (love, closeness, not to be alone) and are ready to give you something in return.

If someone stays with you for over three months, that means you give them something that suits them. Yes, there’s a chance they’ll change their mind someday, and you need to be aware of that. But as long as they stay with you, the idea that they are there only temporarily is less likely than that they will stay because they enjoy being with you.

When to fight for a relationship and when to leave it?

Negative Experiences or Traumas from the Past

In my career, I’ve had several extreme cases of people who developed a fear of relationships, but I’ll mention the case of a guy who, whenever he was left, suffered for 3.5 years. That’s what he told me (as you can see, he had a precise figure). Because of this, he no longer dared to enter relationships, knowing what awaited him afterward.

Now, the idea that you will suffer for years after a relationship is terrifying.

What we did was contemplate how it would look if someone left him in the future, but we also strengthened him. After a while, he stopped viewing the people he entered relationships with as the most important objects in his life.

The agreement was that they were important if they wanted to stay; if they didn’t want to stay, they were simply unimportant. We also learned how to keep women in the relationship, found reasons why they were leaving, and… yes, this story has a happy ending.

Today, he is with a good woman. But the last time we talked, he said to me: “Dee, even if she wants to leave, I don’t care. There are others who want to be with me.” And because of such an attitude, people stay.

It’s part of our psychology that the less someone cares about our presence, the more we feel the need to stay with them. There’s a bit of immaturity in this, but also the fact that such people don’t burden us or obligate us.

But let’s get back to the topic: bad experiences from the past do not depict things that will happen in the future. They can reflect, but only if you don’t work on them. therefore, if you change and change the way you behave in some situations and relationships, the outcome will certainly change. Everything starts from us.

Fear of Rejection

could be a reason why do you give up on relationships.

Not staying in relationships to avoid getting hurt is a good defense mechanism. There’s no chance you’ll get hurt because of it. But you’re always a little hurt because you leave relationships with potential, from people who genuinely want and love you to people you like. Then, when you decide on a relationship, you enter the next relationships with people who are dangerous in the exact same way (that they will leave you), because you already have it in you. Also you’re hurt by people asking you, “Why didn’t it work out again?”

This way, we avoid a big hurt but condemn ourselves to many small hurts.

When it comes to this fear, it would be good to understand that you are afraid of ego injury or narcissistic injury, which you might experience when someone tells you that you’re not good enough.

I like to talk about the ego, but what you need to know briefly is that the ego is an entity within us that strives for us to always be great and always finds a way to defend that greatness. So when someone rejects us, they directly tell that part of us: you’re actually not that great, and the ego doesn’t know how to cope with that or explain it and protect us from that “truth.”

But what I can tell you is that the ego will always find a way to protect you. We have 60 mechanisms that do just that – protect our ego, so it will always pull something out and explain that we are okay.

If you combine this with lowering the other person’s status, you should be safe.

It would roughly go like this: “He/she doesn’t know what they lost. They didn’t get to see how exceptional I am. It’s probably because they’re stupid/don’t recognize real value.” And move on. After all, you wouldn’t date someone who is stupid. (This might take some practice if you tend to distort reality the other way, but it can be trained).

Now, if this sounds artificial to someone, like self-deception, what’s not artificial about having a poor opinion of yourself and a great one about the person who left you?

If you’re already distorting reality, distort it in a way that’s good for you. Because this other way costs you the relationship.

Past Trauma

It is possible that unpleasant experiences you went through early on or traumatic experiences later in life have marked you so much that any intimacy and closeness is a terrifying idea for you.

Here, the suggestion is to seek a clinical psychotherapist or psychologist who can address these traumas.

This is such a complex topic to resolve that it would require a separate support post for those who have been through it, which I will write. But no matter how much support I can offer you, please approach this problem thoroughly, with a professional’s guidance and dedication. Solutions are possible. Remember Lucy from the movie Lucy. With the right inputs, you can become a fighter.

• Of course, this is an exaggerated performance and she became that thanks to the substances, but the message is that from being a victim, with the right actions, we can become brave, courageous and able to defend ourselves. I absolutely recommend using any meetings.

Fear of Emotional Manipulation

Once, during our first conversation, I had a client who set clear conditions for our talks and his life in general. He said: “I don’t allow any forms of manipulation.”

His story is that his wife left him, took a large part of his wealth, and took their children to another country. But before that, he had been developing her business, and she promised she would stay with him forever (I extracted the parts he constantly emphasized. “Instead of focusing on myself, I invested everything I had into her business.”, “She promised she would stay forever. You know, she promised.”)

Because of this, he became a hunter for manipulation, so our therapy was interwoven with his suspicion—whether I was manipulating him, lying to him, comforting him when I shouldn’t, etc.

As Irvin Yalom would say, Here and now, what happens in therapy is undoubtedly happening in regular life.

I knew this client couldn’t establish a long-term relationship because he saw people crying as manipulators. These people fall in love as potential exploiters of his resources, and charming people as dangerous etc. Everything has become a manipulation.

If you fall into this category and harbor doubts about people because you were once emotionally manipulated, I understand you. Your fear is big and somewhat justified, but it is not easy to be alone or to constantly doubt and fear manipulation.

It is not easy to interpret everything as a danger or problem. Interpreting everything as a danger or problem means a person can never relax. If you never relax, you will experience great stress, which produces cortisol secretion, which is bad for your health.

So, with this attitude, you are alone, tense, and in poor health.

Therefore, my recommendation is either psychotherapy or:

• Protect yourself and your resources
• Enter relationships carefully but more openly than before
• Give the benefit of the doubt – they are not guilty until proven otherwise
• Enjoy relationships, but don’t allow exploitation
• Openly seek reciprocity

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Okay, this is the first part of why you fall out of love too quickly and give up on relationships. The following article will address immature thinking, then we have character traits and identity, and the fourth group of reasons are attachment styles and patterns.

Each of these reasons can fatally affect your love life. And each of these reasons is solvable, so there’s no need to be alone.

Finding a good partner is not easy, and it is even more complicated if you are standing in your own way of a beautiful love story. Dee